Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

Angelica, no word for me? After all that has passed between us! Are you perhaps now having doubts because you’re a Jewess and my literary father Ariosto was a Catholic? But love knows no barriers — ethnic differences are nothing to me — both of my birth parents almost certainly worshipped the old gods, as do I. Put aside your doubts — there are no religious obstacles to our union!

Hoyt Smith rang me up to tell me that my request would go out next morning between eleven and twelve. While waiting for that to happen I acted on a heads-up from Phyllis Stein. She collects the paintings and drawings of autistic savants in the belief that they contain hidden messages. She said there was a fellow in Hunter’s Point who was doing the Periodic Table of the Elements with nude figures in elemental combinations, explicitly. Sadominsky was his name and she wanted me to check him out before she showed her chequebook.

So I schlepped myself out to the address she gave me, an ex-factory of some kind, all girders and skylights and high spaces. The door was open and as I stepped inside the Smell hit me. Yes, that one: Volatore! Holding myself ready for whatever there was to be ready for, I advanced slowly.

‘Well,’ said a husky voice with a heavy accent, ‘you looking for?’

‘Sadominsky?’ I said as I descried a bulky figure in a shadowy corner.

‘Zhabotinsky am.’

‘Oh, sorry.’

‘Who sent?’

‘Me?’

‘Why?’

‘Aren’t you doing the Periodic Table of the Elements with nude figures?’

‘They say I?’

‘You what?’

‘Automatic?’

‘You mean autistic?’

‘Not am. Eccentric, OK? They always.’

‘Get it wrong?’

‘Not Periodic Table.’

‘Not?’

‘Big not. Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants.’

‘Elephants!’

‘With beer tell fable to.’

‘Whom?’

The smell got stronger as he put his head on one side and looked at me slyly.

‘Winey, winey trancing clients in the dim red taverns of sheep.’

‘Sheep!’

‘Baa.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Zhabotinsky.’

‘Your name’s always been Zhabotinsky?’

‘Only since born. See paintings?’

‘All right, let’s see them.’

We went past his kitchen to get to the paintings. It consisted of the factory sink, a little fridge, a Coleman stove, and a cardboard box for crockery and pots and pans. Some beets in a string bag. The furniture was orange crates. No empty pizza or Chinese cartons, his budget clearly didn’t run to such luxuries. His clothes were shabby and he was pretty scruffy. The guy was poor.

There were lots of canvases: he was a full-time painter, so what was Volatore to him or he to Volatore? The smell, I noticed, was gone. The paintings were weird and witty and original, not like anyone else’s.

‘These are very good,’ I said.

‘Talk numbers?’ he said.

‘Big numbers if I can sell you as an autistic savant.’

‘No prob. Big autistic savant, me.’

He probably hadn’t ever sold a picture before. He was a latter-day Albert Pinkham Ryder, a recluse who had uncashed cheques lying around all over the place. Except this one had no cheques, maybe he lived on an allowance from an older brother in Siberia, who knows. Maybe he was a dishwasher in some café. Certainly no part of any artistic community or he’d have learned the ropes and found some buyers. A dyed-in-the-wool loner. I was pretty sure I could do right by him.

‘Phone?’ I said.

He took one out of his pocket; he was at least that much connected to the age of technology and commerce.

‘Got a first name?’ I asked him.

‘Alexander. Alyosha you can.’

‘Call you. OK, Alyosha. Let’s see if we can move you into a higher income bracket.’ I wrote down his cellphone number and said, ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow or the day after and arrange to bring somebody to see your work. Be careful crossing streets and don’t talk to strangers. Do svidaniya .’

He kissed my hand. Blessed are the pure in heart, but it takes more than purity to put blintzes on the table.

But Volatore! My Volatore was trying to reach me! Yes,

One day soon, you and I will merge,

Everything that rises must converge …

Yes, my love! I want to merge with you, I long for the two of us to converge! Was it you who put a coin in my jukebox to play me that old Shriekback track? Clever Volatore!

I switched on KDFC a little before eleven just to be on the safe side. ‘Carmencita,’ Smith was saying, ‘which has put me in the mood for Georges Bizet’s masterpiece. Carmen is one of those classics every mezzo has to face. Year after year they step up to the plate to see if they can knock it out of the park. Most of them get a base hit but not too many put a home run up on the scoreboard. You’re about to hear one who who belts it like the old Bambino, Babe Ruth himself. Elina Garanca truly does the biz for Bizet: Carmen sings the seguidilla seated in a chair with her hands tied behind her back. She’s knifed another girl at the cigarette factory where they both work and now, under arrest, she is alone with Don José, the dragoon corporal guarding her while she waits to go to prison. Carmen methodically sets out to seduce him, he unties her hands and she’s off like a shot to join her smuggler pals at Lillas Pastia’s tavern.

‘Garanca’s mezzo can do anything and her Carmen could have seduced the whole platoon, let alone a mama’s boy like Don José.’

‘ “ Près des remparts de Seville ,” ’ she sings,

‘ “ Chez mon ami Lillas Pastia .

Nous dansons la seguidille

Et boirons du Manzanilla .

Tra la la la la la! ” ’

Her voice transported me to that time, illo tempore , when my father and I danced our seguidilla in the foreign country that is the past. ‘ “ Va, pensiero !” ’ I sang, and listened for the Babylon-river Greenbergs to join me. But Hoyt Smith was gone and I was hearing the news, I had missed my message to whoever was listening.

Lydia Greenberg, née Katz, had a brother. Leo, who is still with us and in good health, had a daughter, Phyllis, who is Mrs Irving Stein. Mr Stein is rated by Forbes one of the ten richest men in America. He built his fortune from the bottom up by patenting and marketing the Stein EZ-Sit, an ‘intimate-size’ ring cushion that is worn inside (loose-fitting) clothes and eases the discomfort of haemorrhoids and other afflictions of the down-belows.

Phyllis Stein, probably around forty, give or take, rejoices in a figure both firm and compact, and her face isn’t too bad when she stops frowning and puts on her glasses. She keeps The Kama Sutra and her vibrator under her silk undies in the Fornasetti chest of drawers in her separate bedroom.

Although she has never performed, she has studied modern dance with a teacher who studied modern dance under Martha Graham. As Phyllis moves about the house she does Martha Graham contractions while making little tongue-clickings that irritate her white-haired husband who walks with an ebony-and-ivory stick that cost more than the cook earns in six months.

‘If you’ve got stomach cramps why don’t you take something for it?’ he rasps, pausing for a fit of coughing.

Phyllis ignores him while wishing she had a house savant who could give her a good clear estimate on how soon she might expect to wear the black Versace (waiting in the Fornasetti) of her grieving widowhood. A short course of too much sex might send Irving out of this vale of tears like laundry down a chute but it’s been a long time since Irving was up to even minimal slap-and-tickle, and as yet Phyllis has no Plan B.